“[Modern man] is blind to the fact that, with all his rationality and efficiency, he is possessed by powers beyond his control. The gods and demons have not disappeared at all, they have merely got new names.”
Carl Jung, Collected Works Volume 18
For millennia, in cultures spanning the globe, men and women believed in the existence of demons and saw possession by such forces as an ever-present risk. Most cultures developed practices and rituals to ward off demonic possession and to exorcise them from possessed individuals. In the modern day we consider ourselves to be more enlightened and view demonic possession as a superstitious belief of a bygone era. In this video, we explore why the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung considered this view to be misguided. The demons that wreaked havoc on our ancestors are still with us today. They continue to possess us, to drive us into error, and to push us towards acts of evil, or as Jung writes:
“. . .we are possessed by the demons of sickness no less than [our ancestors], our psyche is just as much in danger of being struck by some hostile influence, we are just as much the prey of malevolent spirits of the dead, or the victims of a magic spell cast by a strange personality. Only we call all these things by different names, and that is the only advantage we have over primitive man…”
Carl Jung, Collected Works Volume 10
To understand how our conception of the demonic has evolved and why we see demons as a superstition, while our ancestors saw them as real, we need to explore a defining feature of the primitive mindset, namely its participation mystique. Participation mystique was a concept introduced by the French philosopher Lucien Lévy-Bruhl in the early-20th century to describe how primitive man lacked a sharp distinction between the inner world of the psyche and the outer world of the environment. This psychological state was a result of primitive man’s high degree of unconsciousness. The primitive, in other words, moved through life relying heavily on instinct and intuition and when elements of the unconscious pressed upwards towards the fringes of conscious awareness, the primitive would project these elements onto the natural world as their egos were too underdeveloped to integrate them into their self-concept. These projections created an animated state of nature where objects, such plants, animals, rocks, rivers and oceans, as well as forces like fire, wind, thunder and lightning, were imbued with human agency and intention. Primitive man’s participation mystique, in other words, psychologically entwined him with the natural world, or as Jung explains:
“What [is] meant by [participation mystique] is simply the indefinitely large remnant of non-differentiation between subject and object. . . When there is no consciousness of the difference between subject and object, an unconscious identity prevails. The unconscious is then projected into the object, and the object is introjected into the subject, becoming part of his psychology. Then plants and animals behave like human beings, human beings are at the same time animals, and everything is alive with ghosts and gods.”
Carl Jung, Collected Works Volume 13
As the psyche is composed of an interplay of opposites – the good and the bad, the light and the dark, the creative and the destructive – primitive’s man projections animated nature with benevolent and malevolent forces. The projection of benevolent forces created the friendly and protective gods of nature, guiding spirits, fairies, and wood nymphs, while malevolent projections, or the projection of the dark and destructive elements of the psyche, were viewed as nature’s dark spirits, angry gods, or evil demons.
“Today we can scarcely imagine this state of mind anymore,” writes Jung “and we can form no proper conception of what it meant to live in a world that was filled from above with the mysteries of God’s wonder, down to the very crucible of the smelter, and was corrupted from below by devilish deception, tainted by original sin, and secretly animated by demons. . .”
Carl Jung, Collected Works Volume 13
Over the millennia, the human psyche underwent a profound transformation. We became more self-aware, and this self-awareness acted as a wedge between subject and object. We increasingly differentiated between the inner world of the psyche and the outer world of nature and as the boundary between inner and outer solidified, we withdrew our projections, and pulled ourselves out of the state of participation mystique, or as Jung writes:
“First [man] was moved to deeds by unconscious factors, and only a long time afterwards did he begin to reflect about the causes that had moved him; then it took him a very long time indeed to arrive at the preposterous idea that he must have moved himself – his mind being unable to see any other motivating force than his own.”
Carl Jung, Collected Works Volume 18
When we stopped using nature as the home for our projections, we forced these psychological energies back within ourselves. We ceased to experience the outer world as populated by spirits, gods, and demons and in the process we depsychized nature. Or as Jung explains:
“…the rabble of spooks that were formerly outside have now transported themselves into the psyche of man, and when we admire the “pure,” i.e., depsychized, Nature we have created, we willy-nilly give shelter to her demons. . .”
Or as Jung writes in Volume 10 of his Collected Works:
“Even though nature is depsychized, the psychic conditions which breed demons are as actively at work as ever. The demons have not really disappeared but have merely taken on another form: they have become unconscious psychic forces.”
Carl Jung, Collected Works Volume 10
Jung believed that in withdrawing our projections we didn’t get rid of the demonic, instead we magnified its danger. For at least when primitive man projected these psychological forces and energies onto nature he was aware of their ever-present danger. Furthermore, when these forces and energies were experienced as external, it promoted the development of religious and shamanic practices to confront and contain them. But once we started to internalize the demonic, we forced it deeper into the unconscious and began to deny they it existed. And as Jung so often stresses, the more something is repressed the more dangerous it becomes. Or as he writes:
“. . .after it became impossible for the demons to inhabit the rocks, woods, mountains, and rivers, they used human beings as much more dangerous dwelling places. In natural objects much narrower limits were drawn to their effectiveness: only occasionally did a rock succeed in hitting a hut, only rarely was it possible for a river to overflow its banks, devastate the fields, and drown people. But a man does not notice it when he is governed by a demon; he puts all his skill and cunning at the service of his unconscious master, thereby heightening its power a thousandfold.”
Carl Jung, Collected Works Volume 18
That modern man is vulnerable to what earlier ages have called demonic possession is most visible in the behavior of those who occupy the highest levels of political power. For the immense authority wielded by such individuals – an authority derived not from moral virtue but from a willingness to partake in the corrupt machinations of the state – creates a dangerous psychological condition. It leads to psychological inflation, or what Jung called “God-Almightiness”, where an individual believes himself to be omnipotent and far superior to the masses over whom he rules. Psychological inflation as Jung explains “causes exaggeration, a puffed-up attitude, loss of free will, delusion, and enthusiasm in good and evil alike” (Carl Jung, Collected Works Volume 7). As Jung conceptualized the psyche as a self-regulating system, when our conscious attitude becomes too one-sided, as it does for the inflated individual, it triggers an equal and opposite reaction from the unconscious. Or as he writes in Volume 11 of his Collected Works: “An inflation is always threatened with a counter-stroke from the unconscious. . .” (Carl Jung, Collected Works Volume 11). The counterstroke for one with a god-complex comes in the form of an activation of the psychological forces of darkness, depravity and destruction and these forces can completely overwhelm the inflated individual, leading to demonic possession. Or as Jung writes:
“We have lost our superstitious fear of evil spirits and things that go bump in the night, but, instead, are seized with terror of people who, possessed by demons, perpetrate the frightful deeds of darkness. That the doers of such deeds think of themselves not as possessed, but as “Superman,” does not alter the fact of their possession.”
Carl Jung, Collected Works Volume 18
While many in the ruling class are controlled by unconscious demonic forces, the masses are not immune to this condition. For when destructive psychological forces press upwards to the fringes of consciousness, as they do for all of us at one time or another, most people cannot accept that these dark powers reside within their own psyche and so like our primitive ancestors we project them. But unlike the primitive, we no longer project these forces onto nature. Science has taught us that rocks, trees, storms, and animals cannot possess human agency. So, the victims of our projections are other people. We project the demonic onto neighbours or colleagues, onto foreigners, immigrants, or members of different ethnic groups or political parties. These others become the screen upon which we find the unacknowledged darkness of our own soul and once located there, we convince ourselves that it is morally justified to bring harm to these people as we think it will help rid the world of evil. But what we overlook is that when we act in this manner we have fallen under the spell of demons and are not decreasing the amount of evil in the world but contributing to its spread. Or as Jung writes:
“. . . a dangerous situation is created because the disturbing effects are now attributed to an evil will outside ourselves, which is naturally to be found nowhere else than with our neighbours on the other side of the river. This leads to collective delusions, incitements to war and revolution, in a word, to destructive mass psychoses.”
Carl Jung, Collected Works Volume 10
